Honesty Enabled by Anonymity

#LoveMe Challenge Day 14: Share a Fear You Overcame

Since Day 13: Share a Quote was such a breeze, I decided to go on to the next one.

Share a Fear You Overcame: I fight my fears on a daily basis, but I’m having trouble thinking of a major fear that I straight up overcame. The consistent battles over the other fears kind of mask the achievements if one isn’t careful.

I think that the epitome of a Fear I Overcame would be a past blog entry: On Dissociation and Multiple Identities. I have always feared sharing my diagnoses with anyone, and out of all of them, Dissociative Identity Disorder was the one that I was the most feared judgment for, and was afraid to tell anyone outside of my closest friends and family, and my therapist.

Even among those who suffer from mental illness, and in the psychiatric community around them, different diagnoses come with different stigmas. Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder are common enough that there is (comparatively) less stigma surrounding them than there is regarding Dissociative Identity Disorder or something like Schizophrenia.

At the risk of using a term that I hate, I’ve always felt like one of the “crazies” even among the other “crazies”, like if you made more common mental illnesses the benchmark of “normalcy”, I would still be in the “crazy” category. This feeling is made all the more complex by the fact that I am very high functioning in spite of my multiple diagnoses (and personalities), and therefore end up, too frequently, being treated by doctors and counselors as if I am suffering from a much less severe form of mental illness than I actually am.

Being open about my diagnostics and mental illness issues has been a terrifying prospect my entire life. And sure, perhaps admitting it anonymously doesn’t sound as much of a triumph over a fear than posting it to Facebook or something would be. But for me, the fear ran just as deep, so it might as well have been the same thing. I’ve been pushing myself to be more open, and an anonymous blog is a big part of what started that, and then enabled me to begin sharing and opening up to people online and in real life.

So, I guess that’s the fear I overcame. The fear of being honest about my problems.

If you’d like to read more about my mental illness issues, please visit my blog post: When There Are No Answers. Thanks for reading.

8 thoughts on “#LoveMe Challenge Day 14: Share a Fear You Overcame”

I would say that definitely counts as completion of Day 14! lol and in all seriousness….don’t downplay the impact talking about it has…even anonymously. It still counts in my eyes because it’s something you are expressing, you’re releasing that paralyzing fear and you are being true to YOU in a healthy way and that’s all that matters. Cheers! 🙂

I often wonder if people realize how difficult it is to write an anonymous blog about such difficult issues. I have found that even with anonymity, it is very challenging at times to break through the fear and write out everything I want or need to say.
Definitely a fear overcome. And very well done, indeed. xx -CC